-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Oct. 30, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------New spotlight shines on racist cover-up in Tawana Brawley case
By Leslie Feinberg
On Nov. 27, 1987, a 16-year-old high school student was found beside a highway in Dutchess County, N.Y. She was semi-conscious and half frozen, clothed only in a plastic bag.
Her body was smeared with excrement. She later explained that six men had abducted her, and raped and tortured her over the course of four days.
If the victim of this monstrous brutality had been a young white woman and the alleged attackers Black, there would have been a break-down-the-doors police hunt. A racist frenzy in the corporate media. A lynch-mob atmosphere.
But the victim was a young African American woman named Tawana Brawley. She described her attackers as six white men. She said they had scrawled racist slurs and the initials KKK on her body, then left her for dead.
What did those at the pinnacle of state power do? They demonized and criminalized Tawana Brawley, her family, her lawyers and advisers.
Eleven months after the attack, a grand jury of 23 people—21 of them white—dismissed the horrific violence done to Tawana Brawley as a hoax. Case closed.
But this case, which galvanized protest by African Americans and anti-racists across the country and especially in New York, is once again resurfacing.
‘Reopen the investigation!’
Reopen the investigation into the Tawana Brawley case. That’s the message Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois has reportedly sent to U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno.
New York filmmaker Curt Stewart says the senator issued the request after he sent her a copy of his new documentary on the Brawley case, which is called "Is Justice a Joke?"
Stewart told reporters he has found evidence that supports Brawley. Stewart says he has found the medics who treated Brawley and that they confirm her injuries. The medics, who never got to testify, are still willing to appear in court, according to Stewart.
Does it seem inexplicable that the grand jury did not hear testimony from the medics? The "investigation" into the crimes against Brawley was such a sham that supporters maintain it was a calculated and extensive cover-up.
Tawana Brawley said she had been abducted by a man who appeared to be a cop and who flashed a badge. Later, she reportedly pointed out a police officer as one of her attackers in the emergency room where cops were questioning her.
Shortly after the attack, authorities reported that a local police officer named Harry Crist had killed himself. His suicide note was kept under wraps as "evidence" in the Brawley case.
The Poughkeepsie Journal of Feb. 17, 1988, reported that Brawley had implicated Dutchess County Sheriff Frederick W. Scoralick. The article also announced that Dutchess County District Attorney William Grady—whose duty was to prosecute the case—had resigned from the investigation in January 1988 because of an unexplained "conflict of interest."
The court appointed another prosecutor. But within 24 hours he too resigned—this time without explanation.
Later reports indicated that Brawley had identified Dutchess County Assistant District Attorney Steven Pagones as one of the six who tortured her.
The same week Brawley was attacked, Black and Latino prisoners who had protested inhuman conditions in the county jail in nearby Goshen, N.Y., were badly beaten by racist guards, some wearing KKK paraphernalia. Brawley was abducted after leaving the prison where she had visited her boyfriend.
No justice for African Americans
Alton H. Maddox Jr., a lawyer for the Brawley family, brought the case to the public spotlight when he called on New York Gov. Mario Cuomo to appoint a special prosecutor to the case—preferably Charles Hynes, who had prosecuted a case of racist murder in the Queens, N.Y., community of Howard Beach the year before.
The capitalist state has appointed special prosecutors in many cases, including cases of alleged corruption from Watergate to Whitewater. But when the demand involved the right of self-determination of the African American community, Cuomo took the position of a colonial representative over a subject people.
Cuomo appointed New York Attorney General Robert Abrams to the case. Abrams had a house in Dutchess County and reportedly enjoyed a close relationship with the Dutchess County prosecutor who was a central suspect in the case.
Referring to the ghastly assault on Brawley, Abrams actually suggested to the media, "Maybe it was consensual."
Not one person was ever arrested or even brought in for questioning for the brutal atrocities against Tawana Brawley. Instead, the state hounded Brawley’s family and supporters.
In March 1988 Maddox charged that Abrams’ office was attempting a "cover-up for the good old boy network," and said Brawley’s lawyers and family would not cooperate. As a result, Cuomo threatened Maddox and fellow lawyer C. Vernon Mason with prosecution.
On April 4, family adviser the Rev. Al Sharpton, singer-activist Pete Seeger and nine other defendants were sentenced to 15 days in jail on disorderly conduct charges after they took part in a large protest in support of Brawley at the State Capitol in Albany. There was also a big march, mostly of women, in midtown Manhattan, in support of Brawley.
On June 14, Cuomo endorsed the state’s proposal to arrest Brawley’s mother Glenda Brawley because she refused to testify until those her daughter accused had been taken into custody.
Cuomo said the law is "the force which has tied this democracy together for 200 years." He failed to note that for almost half of those two centuries U.S. law had upheld enslavement of Black people.
In June, Glenda Brawley was fined and sentenced to 30 days in jail for refusing to cooperate with the kangaroo grand jury. She was forced to seek refuge in Bethany Baptist Church in Brooklyn, surrounded by hundreds of supporters.
The African American media shone the first spotlight on the Brawley case, then dug up evidence and depositions that Abram’s office ignored. By contrast, the corporate media kept up a steady drumbeat of attacks on Tawana Brawley, her family and their lawyers and advisors.
In the almost 10 years since, the big-business media and right-wing, pro-police politicians like New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani have repeatedly called the Brawley case a hoax. These racists present it as accepted fact that the attack on Tawana Brawley was concocted by publicity-hungry people, including Sharpton, to somehow advance their own careers.
The capitalist establishment has spent 10 years discrediting Tawana Brawley and anyone who stood up for her. Why? Because her case became a rallying cry. The African American community was joined in its demand for justice for Tawana Brawley by Latinos, Asians, anti-racist whites, and activists in the women’s movement.
Now that there is a new documentary exposing the racist, sexist cover-up of the crimes against Tawana Brawley and the only Black woman in the United States Senate is demanding a federal investigation, the cries for justice in this case are going to be heard again.
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
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